Mantofa Articles Directory

Writing articles on the web is one of the best ways for solo-professionals to attract more clients and attention for their business. Strategically placing articles can literally explode your business. It’s a great way to generate interest in your services and products and to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Your articles can serve as a commercial to sell your services to new prospects. They are like road signs on the information highway directing traffic to your website.

Articles posted online give you essentially free publicity for your business and many other benefits. As a result of writing and distributing articles, you can gain lots more clients and help many more people with the information you provide. You can become a recognized authority in your area of expertise. You can attract thousands of qualified prospects who you know are interested in your ideas and your products and services. Your ezine list can grow every day, without spending money paying for targeted leads.

Your articles don’t have to be very long. Three hundred and fifty to five hundred words are enough. In fact nowadays, shorter is better. People want their information in quick sound bytes.

Here are four great ways you can use your articles to drive traffic to your website and people to your business:

1) Publish articles at your website

Have a resources page with all of your articles. Create your own article directory. List the title of each article, and also include a few sentences to describe the content based on your site’s keywords. This will raise your rankings with the search engines.

2) Post articles in other people’s ezines or websites

You can reach a new audience by publishing your articles in other people’s ezines or posting at their websites. You benefit from being exposed to their readers, and gain instant credibility as the published expert.

3) Submit your articles to online article directories

Look for online article directories in your favorite search engine. Search on article directories + the name of your area of specialty to find directories that cater to your niche market.

Go to the major list groups like Yahoo and Topica and type “article announce lists” in the search box. Look for large lists and also smaller lists in your niche to submit articles to.

4) Promote your articles to specialty sites in your target marketplace

To bring more targeted visitors to your website, post articles written for your niche market at specialty sites that cater to their needs. Offer specific information that demonstrates your knowledge in your area of expertise.

Writing and publishing articles on a regular basis is one of the most effective ways to grow your professional service business, attract new clients, and become a recognized authority in your area of expertise. Do these four things on a regular basis, and watch calls and emails from prospects and visitors to your website soar!

Jan Marie Dore teaches women business owners secrets to success. Sign up for her savvy and smart FREE e-zine and receive a 30 page Bonus Workbook ‘The 7 Critical Small Business Marketing Mistakes Women Make. . . and Solutions to Easily Fix Them’ by visiting http://www.femalepreneurs.com

The journey is the template upon which a number of successful stories are based upon. A beginning, a middle and an end, all with purpose and hopefully meaning. Your articles should be no different.

If you tap into the unconscious expectations your audience has regarding what a story is and how it should be told, then you will be streets ahead of the rest.

Time is money for freelance writers, so the more you can streamline your writing processes the more time you save, and the more money you’ll make.

Full-time freelance writers will spend the equivalent of a working week on writing.

Most novice freelance writers in the US would be safe charging between $15 and $25 per hour for large project work. That situation obviously changes depending on your experience, command of the language and your location in the world.

The short story, or an article, is the ideal vehicle to begin a writing career. Personal events can provide the fodder for your first article, even if they aren’t particularly memorable or exciting. Concentrate on mastering a style and communication.

Try not to be too fancy with words or thoughts. You can flip open the dictionary or thesaurus when you need it. Just have fun and enjoy the exercise. You don’t have to please anyone but yourself at this level. When you feel more confident, tackle the novel, win that Pullitzer Prize, but for now, just write your article..

If you’re in the first five years of your writing career, enjoy your writing. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself.

Here are some tips for getting focused on developing your freelance writing career and staying that way:

At the least, if you feel you cannot write it yourself, engage the services of a freelance professional, who will work with you to produce a worthwhile summary of your experiences in your chosen area of interest or competence. Ultimately however, developing your writing skills is not a bad idea, as it would enable you do more writing than you could if someone was taking notes from you.

The importance of verbal and writing skills in this information age cannot be stressed enough. The reward of disciplined writing is the most valuable job attribute of all: a mind equipped to think.

One of the best ways to get ideas is to write anything right now. Graham Green forced himself to write at least 500 words daily, whether he felt like it or not. Creative inspiration can strike at any time, but it strikes more often when there is work instead of waiting. Just start writing and you’ll have more creative writing ideas for your articles.

Allen Jesson writes for several sites including http://www.internet-marketing-sense.com and http://www.m1in365.com and then of course, http://www.allenjesson.com

Before we can discuss the benefits of an article directory submission, we must know what an article directory is. An article directory is a clearinghouse for writers to submit original articles that will provide them with a by-line and exposure. It also provides a one-stop shop for publishers to find material to publish on their website to promote their product or service.

One of the first benefits of an article directory, is that it will give you exposure. If they are looking in an resource directory and find that you have written several articles on a given subject, you have become an expert on that subject. They publish your articles on their websites and you become their resident expert on that subject.

The article directory has the benefit of promoting your knowledge, experience, website and product to more people than you could otherwise reach. The next benefit of an article directory is that you are in fact targeting your audience because of the nature of the websites that will publish your articles and the people that will be reading your articles. The people that click the link in your article and go to your website will be more likely to review your product or service.

This is because the people that have been reading your articles now trust what you have to say and look at you as someone they can trust. This will also increase their willingness to try your product or service, which will mean an increase in exposure for you. Article directories can also benefit you by helping you get a higher ranking on many of the search engines. The establishment of backlinks achieves this. A backlink is when someone links back to you and your website.

One of the main points looked at in deciding search engine ranking is how many people have linked to your website. The idea behind any online business is the same as any other type of business – to make money. Article directory submissions and resource sites such as talkinmince are great places to promote your business. You benefit from the degree of exposure you can gain in a relatively short period of time. You benefit from their ability to market you to a wide variety of people that have an interest in what you have to say.

You gain all the benefits from any directory submission that you put out there. You will gain even more benefit by keeping in mind keyword density when you write your articles. This will make them more appealing to the publishers. They will be looking to article directories for articles that will rank high on the search engines and not sound spammy in the process. Your articles benefit them by increasing their ranking and they in turn benefit you by increasing your ranking.

Talkinmince article directory submissions, to find more articles and resources go to http://www.talkinmince.com and our blog http://www.talkinmince.com/tmblog/ for more information.

Article directories receive hundreds of articles daily – but why do some articles perform better than others? In this article we examine some of the reasons.

Article writing, for a competent writer, is a fairly easy discipline. The task is to write an informative and interesting piece of work in the range of some 400-1200 words. Yet many articles that I, as an article directory editor, have seen are just not up to the mark. Why is that? Let’s leave aside for the moment the ones that are grammatically poor or have been obviously assembled by cherry-picking several sources of information.

The function of an article written with the express intent of being reproduced throughout the internet on blogs, ezines and the like is to sell a product – indirectly. It should be written in such a fashion that the reader’s interest is piqued and then held until the article’s conclusion, resulting in a level of interest that stimulates the reader to click through to the author’s site, link or whatever.

Poor articles do not achieve this goal for a variety of reasons and most of these can be summarised by the following points:

1. The article is a blatant advertisment with little or no interesting content.
2. The article rambles on vaguely with no focus or simply has no point to make.
3. The article may have a theme but that theme does not relate very well to either the title or introductory paragraph.

An article, no matter how short, is a story – and all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. In an article that is written for promotional purposes, these ‘anchors’ can also be called question, development and answering conclusion. So what are they and how do they work?

1. The ‘question’ should be in embedded in the title – ‘Green Cheese: Is The Moon Really Made From It?’ is humorous but effective. It defines the question that the article will answer.

2. The development discusses if indeed the moon is made out of green cheese and, if possible, offers some counter-arguments to this – ‘so what then was Neil Armstrong stood upon back in 1969?’ This phase encourages the reader to think and consider what you, the author, are saying – and here you must write with authority, being sure of your facts as you can be. Any signs of insincerity at this point and the reader will realise this. Your authority has then been lost together with the credibility of the article.

3. Answering conclusion: this can either confirm or refute the theory of the moon’s status as green cheese – it depends on how the author wishes to answer his or her own title question. In this fun example we could wind up with something like ‘so it appears the moon is not made of green cheese – but there are those who think it still is. Are you one of them?’ and go on in the authors box to promote telescopes, conspiracy theory books or a host of other things.

The last question is important. It performs the same function as the ‘if you want more information…’ endings but, I think, has a better ring to it as it asks the reader to consider their stance on the subject.

Articles written to the above formula – and article writing is formulaic – will usually perform well. Now let’s consider the badly written and the cut-and-paste sector.

Not everyone speaks English as their first language yet English is the language of choice for article writing. Right or wrong, it’s fact. So I would suggest to those people who write articles and whose first language is not English – get some help. Why? Simple. It doesn’t matter if you are intelligent, well-educated and successful – poorly-written English makes your article look amateurish. Get a copywriter or at least get a fluent (and I do mean fluent) English speaker to vet it for you. You might be surprised at the improvement in reception your articles receive.

For those who (and it really is so apparent) just cut and paste blocks of text from who knows where to make up an article, or for those who simply re-arrange their articles so as to make ten from one, my advice is – give it up. I see these every day. One may get posted to my directory, the rest will be binned. Realise that there is NOT a lot of really high quality content on the internet and write instead just one version of the article – but make it the best you can. That will get you noticed and you will gain the respect of your readers.

If you have got this far in this article then perhaps I’ve proved my point!

Steve Dempster writes fiction, copy and articles for the web. His directory site can be found at http://www.articlemetropolis.com or for more writing info see his site at http://www.iwanttowrite.co.uk

Writer’s block is, quite simply, the block of ideas and creativity that lead a writer to produce nothing.

There are several ideas and theories put forward as to why people have writer’s block. This list includes, but is not limited to:
– depression and anxiety
– natural ebb and flow of writing
– traceable to a single instance
– laziness
– untalented writer
– all written out

The author of the last three items confessed that he never had writer’s block and never wrote an original thought in his writing career. These ideas are included to point out that you should first use common sense when you consider the ideas of others.

The fact is that anyone who endeavors to place his original thoughts and ideas to paper (or computer) will experience that total mind bending blank wall at least one time in his or her career. The question isn’t if it will happen but how to break through it.

Writer’s block is a worm of self-doubt and self-consciousness that can be triggered from any number of circumstances. The real issue isn’t how it happened but rather how to break free of the symptoms. And it is curable.

For some, writer’s block can be a short irritating experience while for others it can last for years. Breaking through writer’s block is a process of self-discovery and also a progression of specific action steps that lead back to productive writing.

You’ve heard the expression that recognizing the problem is half the battle? It’s true. And especially true in this case. Often times writer’s block is chalked up to a half a dozen other excuses or reasons for not being able to write constructively or creatively. It is what it is and it’s writer’s block. Recognizing that will help to cure what ails and move on.

Your next step is to pinpoint the source. Almost all cases can be traced to a specific incident that brings your self-confidence and expertise into question. It might have been an off-handed comment by a colleague or friend; you might have lost a contest or been denied an application. There is a source and your journey will be much quicker if you find it.

Look at the source objectively. Reading is a subjective art form. Even best selling authors have their critics. No one single opinion is that important. Something about that comment popped your enthusiasm. Break it down, look at it closely then discard it.

Writers write because they care. If a writer doesn’t care about his writing there is no writer’s block. Understanding that a writer writes because they want or need to write negates any validity in comments from friends or colleagues. What ever it was that stopped your creativity is not valid. There is enough validity in your need to write.

On a more concrete level, after going through these steps, you should then make the effort to sit down and write each day. Even if you only put gibberish to paper you will find that the simple act of writing will gradually increase your self-confidence and assure you that your expertise has not magically disappeared.

Writer’s block is an irritating self-confidence issue that can easily lead to years of self-destruction if not addressed properly. Sadly, the world is would be without many of today’s greatest works if the authors had not addressed their issues and moved on.

Jo Han Mok is a #1 bestselling author and frequent featured speaker at Internet Marketing bootcamps and conferences. Visit his website for a simple step-by-step plan to profit online in 21 days or less!

http://www.SuperFastProfit.com